The Mary Sue » Oculus Rifthttp://www.themarysue.com
The Nexus of Pop Culture and the Uncharted UniverseTue, 03 Mar 2015 20:18:24 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=2015.10This Artist Is Going to Use Oculus Rift to Live as Someone Else for 28 Days - 28 days later...http://www.themarysue.com/arist-oculus-rift-the-other/
http://www.themarysue.com/arist-oculus-rift-the-other/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 21:39:10 +0000http://www.themarysue.com/?p=282733

Seeing-I is a technologically-driven piece of performance art in which Mark Farid will be confined to a gallery to watch someone else’s life flash before his eyes for 28 days.

That life will belong to someone known as “the other.”

No, wrong others. Pay attention.

The other will wear a pair of glasses with a hidden camera and record the video and audio footage to be used in Farid’s Oculus Rift ahead of time. Then Farid will sit alone in a gallery and watch the life of another human being in virtual reality in an attempt to live out Being John Malkovichget at the nature of self in a way just regular meditation couldn’t live up to.

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/arist-oculus-rift-the-other/feed/0There’s An Oculus Rift Project At Sundance Where You Experience Sexual Assault From Two Different POVshttp://www.themarysue.com/oculus-sexual-assaults/
http://www.themarysue.com/oculus-sexual-assaults/#commentsMon, 26 Jan 2015 19:53:28 +0000http://www.themarysue.com/?p=278058

Trigger warning: the following story contains mentions of sexual assault.

Despite what you might think, Sundance Film Festival doesn’t just involve a bunch of indie films you’ll probably never see and a ton of big-name stars in parkas (though both of those things are quite prevalent in Park City this week). Sundance also features lots of new media innovations, and this year the Oculus Rift is getting lots of play – in some potentially problematic ways.

As part of the New Frontier Exhibitions, you can immerse yourself in the 3D-filmed Perspective; Chapter 1: The Party, in which you experience first-hand the story of a sexual assault at a frat party. In two five-minute clips, you watch the events unfold from both male and female perspectives: a woman passes out at a frat house, and then two men discuss raping her. (At no point do you witness the actual assault).

Creator Rose Troche said, “To me this is where social consciousness and narrative film can sort of interact.” Co-creator Morris May said that after working in visual effects for blockbusters, he wanted to “make something that can possibly have a social impact or help people learn about the world.”

Over on BuzzFeed, people who were immersed in the work first-hand discuss how it made them feel; everything from sickened to terrified to distraught. They also comment on how easy it would be for a certain type of person to feel titillated by this work, instead of looking at it as a medium through which to discuss the horrifyingly-common problem of something like on-campus sexual assault.

The next chapter of Perspective will deal with a clash between a protestor and a police officer but the creators mention they’re not sure how it could be distributed or applied in the real world. What do you think about the use of the Oculus Rift to tell fully-immersive stories, or as an educational tool?

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/oculus-sexual-assaults/feed/0Virtual Reality Headsets Might Someday Be Used As “Forensic Holodecks” To Map Out Crime Scenes - I'd be suspicious of letting Barclay near one of those things.http://www.themarysue.com/virtual-reality-forensic-holodeck/
http://www.themarysue.com/virtual-reality-forensic-holodeck/#commentsMon, 12 Jan 2015 17:55:22 +0000http://www.themarysue.com/?p=274566

Do you have the uncanny ability to imagine exactly how a violent crime might have taken place with very little spatial information to go on? If so, then you might be Will Graham, and we’re very sorry about that. For everyone else, being on a jury could one day involve strapping an Oculus Rift to your face and watching a crime reenactment play out in real time.

While forensic information is traditionally presented to the court via 2D representations on paper, 3D maps and diagrams of crime scenes are no longer as uncommon as they once were, which many people in the field believe can help to make jurors to make better-informed decisions about a defendant’s possible guilt or innocence.

“We have detailed measurements and all this 3D information, but then we hand it over on paper, and that comes with a loss of information,” Lars Ebert, who works at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Zurich, told New Scientist. “But the second you see [a bullet's trajectory] in 3D, you know where it originated, where it goes, how close all the people and objects are.”

Ebert and his colleagues are currently developing a program they’re calling the “Forensic Holodeck,” which uses the immersive technology of virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift to place viewers directly inside 3d reconstructions of crime scenes. I’d correct them on their misuse of the term (The Holodeck doesn’t need a headset, which is sort of the point) if it didn’t sound like the coolest thing to ever exist.

The above video is a recreation of a shooting that occurred in Zurich, populated only with details relevant to the bullet’s trajectory—height, arm-length and posture.They presented the reconstruction to police officers present at the shooting, who were impressed by the accuracy of the model.

The technology might also be used to show jurors scenes from the perspective of different people who were there, in order to demonstrate whether a witness could have accurately identified a suspect from a particular angle. But as always, there is the possibility of unintended bias. “Think of a murder scene: whether you view it from the point of view of the murderer, the victim or a third person will totally change your perception of what’s happening,” says digital reconstruction developer Damian Schofield from the State University of New York in Oswego. Either way, he notes, it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing it show up in criminal courts.

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/virtual-reality-forensic-holodeck/feed/0Dying Light‘s Oculus Rift Support Is a Perfect Fit for the Game and VRhttp://www.themarysue.com/dying-light-oculus-rift-demo/
http://www.themarysue.com/dying-light-oculus-rift-demo/#commentsFri, 12 Dec 2014 15:02:09 +0000http://www.themarysue.com/?p=266990Dead Island, Call of Juarez) Dying Light is an open world zombie game all about freedom in moving around the environment to escape your imminent doom at the bloody hands of the infected. If that kind of huge, open world ready for exploration seems like a perfect fit for the Oculus Rift, that's probably because it is.]]>

Techland’s (Dead Island, Call of Juarez) Dying Light is an open world zombie game all about freedom in moving around the environment to escape your imminent doom at the bloody hands of the infected. If that kind of huge, open world ready for exploration seems like a perfect fit for the Oculus Rift, that’s probably because it is. The Rift may not be commercially available just yet, but if you’ve got a dev kit for your gaming PC or you’re thinking about getting one, this game is a great reason.

I got to try out a bit of Dying Light‘s PC build on the Rift, and all I could think about was a Game/Show episode which proclaimed we’d all be bad at virtual reality. The VR demo was a lot of fun, but I died. A lot. It wasn’t the game’s fault, though; I was struggling to get used to doing something by moving my head that I’ve been heavily conditioned over the years to do with my thumb. For those wondering, forward/back and left/right movement was handled by the left thumb stick, while looking around was accomplished by moving my head with help from the right thumb stick.

But perhaps the best way to play is to stand in the middle of a room and actually use head movement entirely to look around. Techland producer Tymon Smektała told me that’s how he likes to play it, and after the combination of joystick and head movement put me through some awkward neck positions, I definitely see why.

And that’s why VR pairs so well with Dying Light. The game’s environment is designed for maximum immersion. Day, night, and weather all cycle automatically as you’d expect from a modern open world game. You can climb on pretty much anything and go just about anywhere you can see in the massive quarantine zone, and a lot of your time is spent running from zombies instead of engaging them if you want to stay alive. When you add a VR headset to that, you really feel like you’ve been dropped in the middle of a zombie-infested city.

I only got to play a short demo mission and a brief intro to the game, but what they showed me of the later portions looked promising. You can scour the environment for items to fashion weapons and health kits, and weather conditions play into which of your souped-up zombie clobberers works best. You can secure safe houses to take a quick nap if you’d like to switch from day to night a bit faster. While it’s an FPS and less puzzle-intensive than Resident Evil games, its survival elements are still front and center.

You’ll need distract your undead pursuers by banging on things to make noise, setting off traps, and throwing small explosives. As you run from some of the deadlier enemies, there’s a quick-look function which allows you to check over your shoulder in slow motion to see how close they are on your tail. There’s even an RPG element which lets you to gain new abilities such as tossing knives back during a rear-view check to slow down those who hunger for your brains.

Techland is aiming for Dying Light to be one of the first games to really push the envelope for what next-gen consoles can do, and what’s shaping up so far looks promising. As the game approaches its January 27, 2015 release date, we’ll let you know what we think of the whole thing, but for now, I’m definitely looking forward to it.

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/dying-light-oculus-rift-demo/feed/0Go Get Amazed by Interstellar’s Traveling Oculus Rift Experience. I Sure Was. - Outer space should definitely be first on your list of places you'd like to go with VR.http://www.themarysue.com/interstellar-oculus-rift/
http://www.themarysue.com/interstellar-oculus-rift/#commentsMon, 06 Oct 2014 23:30:23 +0000http://www.themarysue.com/?p=250219Interstellar doesn't hit theaters until early November, but IMAX and Oculus Rift have teamed up to bring space to a few movie theaters across the country. We tried it, and if you're near one of the locations they'll visit, it's well worth it both for an Oculus Rift demo and the sensation of actually traveling to outer space.]]>

Interstellar doesn’t hit theaters until early November, but IMAX and Oculus Rift have teamed up to bring space to a few movie theaters across the country. If you’re near one of the locations they’ll visit, it’s well worth it both for an Oculus Rift demo and the sensation of actually traveling to outer space.

The tour kicked off today at the AMC Lincoln Square 13 in NYC—where it will be through October 8—and I got to strap on the Rift Development Kit 2 and see what all the fuss about this “outer space” is.

I’ve been dying to try the Rift for myself for approximately as long as it has existed, so the combination of that and the fact that this demo lets you explore the inside of a ship in outer space was more than a little exciting. When it starts, you’re in an on-rails tour through the inside of the Endurance.

Because it’s the Oculus Rift, of course, you can look around any which way you like and take in all the little details, which I was absolutely too busy doing to listen to the voice coming through the headphones telling me something about my mission. “I’m sorry, what? A mission? I can’t hear you over the deafening sound of my brain screaming I’M IN SPACE RIGHT NOW.”

It’s kind of like being one of the humans in Wall-E, because you’re in a giant, comfy chair gliding around the inside of a spaceship. And the chairs aren’t just for show, either. They move, which makes the effect really incredible when the ship’s artificial gravity shuts down halfway through the demo. I hope there’s a cleanup crew standing by, because someone is going to find out they don’t have what it takes to save humanity and vomit on one of these things.

You’ll spend a little while spinning through zero gravity and probably waving your real hands at fake floating objects—which is pretty entertaining to watch from outside the Rift, too—and then you’ll be reminded you’re not just looking around the interior of a spaceship when you look up and see the giant void of the wormhole you’re about to pass through outside the window.

And then it cuts just when you’re dying for more, because of course it does. The experience is short, but if you have any interest in virtual reality, outer space, or Interstellar, it is absolutely worth it—especially because it’s free. You can get in first-come, first-served basis from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. at the participating theaters:

New York City – October 6-8: AMC Lincoln Square 13

Houston – October 17-19: AMC Gulf Pointe 30

Los Angeles – October 25-27: AMC City Walk

Chantilly, Virginia – November 5-19: Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center

Interstellar advance showings start on November 5 with tickets available through a dedicated website, which also has ticketing options for the full release on November 7.

From Entropy Trading Company, this vintage-looking S.P.E.W. poster is a lot better than Hermione could ever have done. Say what you want about that fantastic lady, but she isn’t all that great with campaign organizing. (via BoingBoing)

Why is this iguana in a party hat? Because he’s wishing his owner a “herpy” (like a herpetologist) birthday. Awww. Over on Neatorama, you can see his adorable tarantula buddy also getting into the celebratory mood.

I generally think that pearl-clutching over Internet porn is nothing more than fuddy-duddy hysteria, but this… this just takes the uncanny valley cake. According to Rocket News 24, one “resourceful” Internet user has taken it upon himself to MacGyver a boob-grabbing game using an Oculus Rift, a novelty mouse pad, and a lady apparently animated to appear non-consenting. Sigh. Boobs trump “women are hard to animate,” I guess.

According to Rocket News 24, a video of the game was posted on Japanese video-sharing site NicoNico Douga by user Ryuto (the game was also available for demo use this Sunday at OcuFes in Nagoya).

You can watch another, currently-unembeddable video of the game over at Rocket News, but here’s their description of that clip’s most troubling aspect:

So, as you can see, the device is fairly simple–the user puts on the Oculus Rift, which provides a 3-D scene and an animated girl, and then reaches out to cop a feel. Upon squeezing the breasts–which are actually foam from a novelty mouse pad–the girl squeals with shock, covers her chest with her arms, and turns her eyes to the ground. Which leaves us wondering: If you could program anything for this simulator, why would you make the girl dislike having her breasts squeezed?!

It might seem like a tempest in a titpot to be concerned over a single game demo invented by what I hypothesize is an extremely lonely Internet user, but as virtual reality becomes more mainstream, so will the potential for “3D porn” and a consequent need to discuss the ethics therein. No matter how down I am for responsible and critical consumption of adult entertainment, the development of a game that not only trivializes sexual harassment but trains users that “no” actually means “go” is extremely disconcerting–especially considering the ingrained misogyny already apparent in gamer culture.

This kind of gross co-option of Oculus Rift is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean concerned Internet users can’t fight fire with fire. I’m breaking ground on the Cock Blockulus Rift right now, everyone. Come on over and use my novelty mousepad to take out frustration on anyone who has ever mistaken you as an object designed purely for their grubby basement desire.

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/oculus-rift-grope-game/feed/0Things We Saw Today: How To Assemble Your Ikea Xenomorph - In space, no one can hear you screw!http://www.themarysue.com/things-we-saw-today-646/
http://www.themarysue.com/things-we-saw-today-646/#commentsFri, 05 Sep 2014 23:20:07 +0000http://www.themarysue.com/?p=239665

Cartoonist Ed Harrington has a series of IKEA-style instructions for assembling beloved movie monsters. Sure, a Human Centipede from IKEA won’t be the greatest quality, but at least it’s economical! (via Laughing Squid)

BBC Radio is collaborating with Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman to dramatize Good Omens. (via BBC America)

Disney is suing musician Deadmau5 over mouse-head trademark. (via Death and Taxes)

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/things-we-saw-today-646/feed/0Comic-Con Goers Get To Pretend They Are Jaeger Pilots Thanks to the Oculus Rift - THIS IS FOR...UH... VIRTUAL, MAKOhttp://www.themarysue.com/comic-conulous-rift-jaegers/
http://www.themarysue.com/comic-conulous-rift-jaegers/#commentsThu, 24 Jul 2014 19:30:02 +0000http://www.themarysue.com/?p=224814jaeger pilot simulations? This in untoward, Comic-Con! Do you hear me? This is not toward!
]]>

God damn it, San Diego Comic-Con. We can handle being away from the collectible toys, the incredible panels, and even Wonder Woman herself. But jaeger pilot simulations? This in untoward, Comic-Con! Do you hear me? This is not toward!

To remind people that Pacific Rim is still a thing and possibly drum up some goodwill for the upcoming sequel and animated series, Legendary has brought an Oculus Rift-powered VR simulator, which places you inside the giant robot head of Yancy and Raleigh Becket’s jaeger at the beginning of the film. Your mission? To punch that Knifehead guy in his dumb monster face.

Unfortunately you also don’t get a drift compatible co-pilot to help you, which is practical (you know, since the drift doesn’t really exist), but also upsetting. Can you even imagine the meet-cutes they could have facilitated if they asked strangers to partner up? “Wow, you two are so close! How did you become friends?” “By canceling the apocalypse together. You wouldn’t understand.”

You’re put in the mech’s head, given a neural handshake, and thrown into battle. Look back, and you’ll see the guts of the massive apparatus you’re in. Look down, and you’ll see the Jaeger’s massive humming energy core beneath your moving feet. (“This,” you might say, “is the closest I may ever come to being Charlie Hunnam and/or fighting a kaiju.”) Oh, and when you look forward, you’re looking right into the eyes (or mouth, or whatever) of a massive kaiju. It’s more immersive than even seeing the film in 3-D Imax, and—let’s face it—that felt pretty freaking immersive.

If you can’t get to Comic-Con this weekend, though, then you can do what I did during a holiday vacation this year to recreate the feel of being in a Jaeger: get on a star-climber located in a cruise liner’s fitness center, put on the Pacific Rim theme song, and stare out at the ocean like you’re the one moving the ship in search of kaiju to smash. You could also just find a regular stair-climber anywhere and just imagine you’re in the ocean, though, since cruise tickets are also pretty expensive. But probably cheaper than flights to San Diego right now, am I right? *sob*

In addition to ball pits, pizza parties and millions of parents regretting their decision to procreate, visitors to Chuck E. Cheese will now have access to an eerie virtual reality populated only by the poor man’s Mickey Mouse.

The party zone’s first foray into the Oculus Rift has been given the awkward title of Chuck E. Cheese’s Virtual Ticket Blaster Experience. Watch it in action:

Judging from the clip, the game doesn’t seem as ridiculous as the phrase “Chuck E. Cheese Oculus Rift” might sound–the titular rat is only 3/5ths as abrasive as I expected, and the tube that houses the game eliminates my fear of Blaster players smacking into each other. I’m not sure why tickets need to rain down upon the gamer in both virtual reality and real life, but since just the idea of stepping into a Chuck E. Cheese makes me want to go to bed for a week I’m probably just not in touch with what kids are into these days.

The press release states:

The headset uses 360–degree head-tracking technology and features a 3D view so users feel as though they are inside the Ticket Blaster with Chuck E. During the experience, the headset will register the number of tickets collected, which will be fully redeemable at the merchandise counter.

If you want to experience the company’s take on the latest in gaming and are also about to have your seventh birthday, plan ahead! Blaster is currently just in a testing period and is only available in six markets. You’ll be able to find the headset soon at select Dallas, Orlando, and San Diego locations, as well as my personal Hell.

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/chuck-e-cheese-oculus-rift/feed/1Oculus Rift Keeps Getting Weirder With a Full Body Bird Simulation Ride: Birdly - Now we just need a Rift port of Flappy Bird.http://www.themarysue.com/oculus-rift-birdly/
http://www.themarysue.com/oculus-rift-birdly/#commentsFri, 09 May 2014 15:18:22 +0000http://www.geekosystem.com/?p=206004Birdly. They built a machine that pairs with the Oculus Rift to make you really feel like one of our fine feathered friends.]]>

The Oculus Rift has the potential to let human beings experience things they never thought they could through the magic of virtual reality. It’s great when paired with a VR treadmill like the Virtuix Omni, but that wasn’t going quite far enough for the team behind Birdly. They built a machine that pairs with the Oculus Rift to make you really feel like one of our fine feathered friends.

One that’s standing in an elevator listening to Muzak, apparently.

Cheap jokes about the choice of trailer music aside, Birdly actually looks like a lot of fun. Luckily, the nature of the Rift prevents you from seeing yourself while you’re wearing it, because it also looks kind of silly if you’re not the one playing it.

No one wants to be aware that this is the reality behind their illusion:

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/oculus-rift-birdly/feed/1Oculus Rift Users Experience What Real Life Would Be Like With Lag - Frustrating, confusing, and dangerous. Pretty much par for the course. http://www.themarysue.com/oculus-rift-real-life-lag/
http://www.themarysue.com/oculus-rift-real-life-lag/#commentsMon, 28 Apr 2014 22:06:09 +0000http://www.geekosystem.com/?p=204341

If you had any doubts that experiencing lag in real life would suck even more than it does online, several brave Oculus Rift users agreed to experience simulated lag of up to three seconds while attempting to perform daily tasks as part of this ad for ume.net. Spoiler alert: it looks horrible.

Apparently lag IRL looks (and probably feels) like being drunk. If you’re debating investing in a Rift, then go ahead and use that as your justification: depending on your average alcohol consumption, you could actually save money in the long run. Although I suspect living life with lag would result in several costly hospital trips.

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/oculus-rift-real-life-lag/feed/2Find Out What It’s Like To Speed Around From Sonic’s POV With The Oculus Rift - Spoiler alert: it's pukey.http://www.themarysue.com/sonic-oculus/
http://www.themarysue.com/sonic-oculus/#commentsSat, 26 Apr 2014 18:45:09 +0000http://www.geekosystem.com/?p=204167Sonic the Hedgehog. In first-person.]]>

So we’ve established that you’re probably going to suck at virtual reality gaming for a while – you need to stop getting motion sick long enough to, you know, actually play. Here’s a game for the Oculus that will definitely not help with that – it’s Sonic the Hedgehog. In first-person.

What we’ve gained from this video is that Sonic is a stone-cold bad-ass who has no problem hurtling head-first towards doom. You can download your own copy of the game for Oculus here, if you’re so inclined/have taken lots of Gravol. YouTuber Chadtronic has also tried out my favorite N64 game ever, Mario 64, in first-person – now that I’d like to rock.

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/sonic-oculus/feed/0Oculus Rift Gets Disassembled to Drop Some Facts in Latest Vsauce Video - You can learn a lot about something by taking it apart. Or letting Jake Roper do it for you.http://www.themarysue.com/oculus-rift-fact-surgery/
http://www.themarysue.com/oculus-rift-fact-surgery/#commentsMon, 21 Apr 2014 19:16:49 +0000http://www.geekosystem.com/?p=203299

Jake Roper from Vsauce3 just emailed us the latest video in his “Fact Surgery” series of stop-motion videos disassembling gaming systems and uncovering facts about them in the process. This time around he takes apart the Oculus Rift. In the email he also assured us that we “R Fresh 2 Death.” Thanks. We think.

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/oculus-rift-fact-surgery/feed/1Move Over, Twitch Plays Pokémon: The New Hotness Is Virtuix Omni Pokémon - Where the tall grass is actually tall.http://www.themarysue.com/virtuix-omni-pokemon/
http://www.themarysue.com/virtuix-omni-pokemon/#commentsTue, 08 Apr 2014 20:20:00 +0000http://www.geekosystem.com/?p=201284Pokémon the way that God and Nature intended: by trotting about on an itty bitty treadmill.]]>

Fighting with thousands of other onlookers just to get your player character to move in the right direction? Pffft. That’s so two months ago. Now we’d rather play Pokémon the way that God and Nature intended: by trotting about on an itty bitty treadmill.

The gameplay footage in this Virtuix Omni is ported from a fan-created Minecraft-inspired version of Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal entitled Pokémon3D, which was first launched in August 2012 and is currently on version 0.46.It’s obviously not as flashy as the animation in the latest 3DS games, but when all’s said and done, I think I’d rather prefer to run around in the old-school pixelated Pokémon world of my youth. For one thing, the music is way better.

If you’re jonesing for a Virtuix Omni of your very own, they’re currently available for pre-order at just under $500 — not a bad price compared to other treadmills on the market, though you’ll have to buy the Oculus Rift headset separately. Pokémon fans who don’t want to wait can currently download Pokémon 3D for Windows on the game’s website.

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/virtuix-omni-pokemon/feed/0Kickstarter Backers Are Mad at Oculus Over Facebook Deal, But Maybe Everyone Should Just Chill Out - Too bad the Internet is fueled by pure fan rage.http://www.themarysue.com/kickstarter-backers-mad-at-oculus/
http://www.themarysue.com/kickstarter-backers-mad-at-oculus/#commentsWed, 26 Mar 2014 15:38:03 +0000http://www.geekosystem.com/?p=199211

Man, people are really upset over the whole Oculus Rift/Facebook deal, and perhaps most understandably, their backers on Kickstarter are feeling the most betrayed. Still, maybe we should all pause for a moment of sanity before making any Vines of throwing a Rift in the garbage.

Since the announcement last night that Oculus had sold to Facebook for $2 billion dollars, angry backers have been sharing their thoughts and feelings on the Oculus Kickstarter comments page. Some backers are just a bit disappointed, like John Susek, who said, “I’m disappointed. You had the potential to become bigger than Facebook on your own.”

Then, there are the people like Jason Baxter, who are pretty upset, saying, “Disgusted. Did you have to stoop so low? Really?”

And then, some are furious and completely disillusioned like Sergey Chubukov, who wrote, “You selling out to Facebook is a disgrace. It damages not only your reputation, but the whole of crowdfunding. I cannot put into words how betrayed I feel by this.”

Whoa, let’s just back up a bit, everyone, and look at this logically with our hurt feelings suppressed for a moment. I can think of a whole lot of reasons for the Oculus team to sell to Facebook (approximately 2 billion reasons), but what about the people who backed them on Kickstarter? Should they be upset?

Probably not, and not just because I think a lot of them have an overblown sense of entitlement. After realizing how upset everyone got by the sale, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey headed over to Reddit to answer some questions and assure fans that nothing about Oculus was going to change.

You can read the whole thread on Reddit, of course, but the important thing is that he’s promised that you won’t need to log in with Facebook to use your Rift, and any ads will be the choice of the software developer and not mandated to appear on the hardware by Facebook. Basically, people are interpreting the Facebook deal to mean that Rift’s VR software will come from and work directly through Facebook, but they’re missing the point that the Rift is a piece of hardware that developers are free to develop any software for.

That’s the benefit of a VR headset that’s not tied to a console like Sony’s Project Morpheus is tied to PlayStation, and it’s a benefit that Luckey has promised won’t change with Facebook. I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg has a ton of software ideas in mind for using the Rift in conjunction with Facebook, but it’ll be a piece of PC hardware that you’ll be able to use with software from different developers just like any other monitor, joystick, or mouse.

This is where the people who are upset about the deal kind of lose their footing, because they respond to statements like this with responses like, “But you can’t trust Facebook. They’re going to make it proprietary and fill it with ads and make it a tool for gathering data.” I understand that line of thinking, but it’s completely unfair to start slinging insults and talk of betrayal at Oculus without even waiting to see if those fears come true.

For instance, I completely understand why Markus Persson would back out of the Oculus/Minecraft deal until he knows how everything is going to play out, but that doesn’t mean we’re never going to get Minecraft on the Rift. It might, but it might also mean that it doesn’t come to the Rift until Persson sees that Facebook’s involvement hasn’t changed anything.

It also doesn’t mean we’re never going to get Minecraft in virtual reality. The other thing the angry backers seem to be forgetting is that Oculus doesn’t own VR. If the Rift becomes nothing more than a way for you to look at pictures of your friends’ pets and babies on Facebook all day so they can sell ads and mine your user data, that doesn’t mean it won’t pave the way for VR as a whole.

Whether you’re a fan of Mark Zuckerberg’s methods, and Facebook’s by extension, or not, he’s betting big on the future of technology. He wants to put the Rift in as many homes as possible as quickly as he can, and getting people to buy a new form of technology is the hardest part of the virtual reality struggle. If Facebook’s Oculus plans to make the Rift cheap to buy and accelerate its development are successful, it’ll get society as a whole to understand and accept VR as something they want in their daily lives, which should lead to faster adoption of VR hardware and then wider support from software developers.

At that point, what you’re upset about is that the headset you initially backed (the Rift), was used to get VR into the public consciousness, but an almost identical product with a different name winds up being the one that you play most of your video games on. To me, that seems like a very minor sticking point when we’re talking about a technology revolution like virtual reality.

Either way, Oculus Kickstarter backing dollars won’t go to waste, and I’m 100% sure of that. Other companies are already seeing the positive response to the Rift and trying to capitalize on it for themselves. If the Rift crashes and burns because of Facebook, another headset will almost certainly rise to take its place, and it will have Oculus to thank for opening up the market. Your donation was not made in vain.

And that’s what the backers seem to be most upset about. They’ve commented that, with the grand talk on the Oculus Kickstarter page, they thought they were backing an idea and a future more than an individual company that could be sold out from under them. In their complaints, they’re missing the fact that this sale doesn’t kill that vision that they contributed to.

One way or another, this technology is the future, and every dollar donated to Oculus has helped make that possible.

The growth of the oculus rift is incredibly exciting, but it’s totally going to explode your brain when you put it on, because we have a harder time distinguishing between virtual reality and actual reality than we previously thought. So how’s this going to affect our gaming abilities? PBS Game/Show attempts to explain.

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/virtual-reality-gameshow/feed/0“Jerry’s Place VR” Lets You Explore Seinfeld’s Apartment With an Oculus Rift Headset - Just don't try to burst through the door like Kramer does, because the door does not really exist.http://www.themarysue.com/jerrys-place-vr/
http://www.themarysue.com/jerrys-place-vr/#commentsMon, 03 Mar 2014 20:25:50 +0000http://www.geekosystem.com/?p=196092

Do you wish that you and your friends were so compelling and interesting that you could talk about nothing on broadcast television for nine years and get Emmy’s for it? Do you also wish you lived in an apartment that transcends the rules of modern urban planning? Have we got the virtual reality program for you!

Created by Greg Miller as a fun side-project, the program was built entirely from scratch using Blender and the Unity game engine. Anybody with a PC/Mac and an Oculus Rift headset can download the program itself and wander around Jerry’s Upper West Side pad for themselves by checking out the Jerry’s Place website. Greg says of his efforts:

I did a lot of research and tried to find images of the original products used in the show, and modeled around those dimensions, rather than relying solely on blurry screen shots. I found lots of good footage of the bathroom in the episode “The Barber,” during the part that Newman enters Jerry’s bathroom to find a hair sample. I feel like the main room and the bathroom are very well created, however I could only find one screen shot of Jerry’s bedroom, at the end of “The Chicken Roaster.” I used a blurry screen grab to texture the painting above his bed, and was able to recreate the bed, sheets and nightstands accurately. Unfortunately, due to the dimensions of the apartment it seems like it would be impossible to actually fit the bedroom the way the show depicts it. It came out cramped, but I’m happy with it.

While the 3D rendering is terrifyingly accurate, right down to the load-bearing walls (though Greg admits he needs to find a better Superman model), the music in his progress video is decidedly less so. Thus, in order to capture the magic of that long forgotten era of ’90s television, we bring you a more authentic representation of the Seinfeld theme song that you can play over the above Youtube clip.

What? This is the Internet. You were expecting it to not be sung by a bird?

]]>http://www.themarysue.com/jerrys-place-vr/feed/0You Can Play The Legend of Zelda From Link’s POV With The Oculus Rift - Living in an 8-bit world has never been more heroic.http://www.themarysue.com/zelda-oculus/
http://www.themarysue.com/zelda-oculus/#commentsSat, 22 Feb 2014 17:15:26 +0000http://www.geekosystem.com/?p=194977really want out of virtual reality gaming is the ability to play The Legend of Zelda from a first-person perspective. That's right; you can be Link (just make sure you keep quiet).]]>

The Oculus Rift can be used for all sorts of amazing things, like controlling space robots and diffusing bombs. But let’s be honest with ourselves – what we really want out of virtual reality gaming is the ability to play The Legend of Zelda from a first-person perspective. That’s right; you can be Link (just make sure you keep quiet).

Though only in Beta, the game is a pretty exact clone of The Legend of Zelda for NES – you can play all the way through to the end of the first dungeon. The full game will be available (for free!) in March; but, if you have an Oculus headset already, you can try out the demo right here.